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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

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Appalachian poet
and fiction-writer Ron Rash is emerging as an international literary superstar.
Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s back-cover endorsement of his 2014 short story
collection Nothing Gold Can Stay declares, “Like his great predecessors,
Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and especially Eudora Welty, Ron Rash’s stories
are rooted in the American South and from that place and those people, he
writes marvelously rich and compelling vignettes of life as he has seen and imagined
it.” In her assessment of Burning Bright (2010), an earlier volume of
Rash short stories, Irish Times reviewer Eileen Battersby proclaims,
“Magnificent is suddenly too small a word.” Discussing his efforts to make his
Appalachian characters accessible to readers outside the region, Rash noted in
a July 2015 interview, “One thing that has pleased me is that my books are in,
I think, eighteen languages now. I just got an e-mail from China, that the
books are doing very well there, and the editor there was talking about the
number of young Chinese writers who are reading [my work] and influenced by
it…. I was in France a few years ago, and a woman said, ‘You’ve told the story
of my life’” (interview with the author).

While
they wait for their copies of his newest novel, Above the Waterfall, to
arrive, readers in France, China, and here in the US who are only now boarding
the Rash bandwagon will find plenty to ponder in his earlier work. Just this
year, the University of South Carolina Press issued a ­twentieth-anniversary
edition of his MFA short-fiction project, The Night the New Jesus Fell to
Earth (1994), featuring stories both heart-breaking and hilarious. Most of
his subsequent work is far darker, chronicling instances of environmental,
social, and personal devastation in the western North Carolina landscape where
Rash grew up. His writing has gathered literary power over time, but his nearly
ten-year-old, relatively underappreciated novel The World Made Straight
(2006) demands our attention now. As hair-raising as any thriller on the
best-seller lists, The World Made Straight transcends the pulp fiction
genre to challenge readers to reconsider our perceptions of last summer’s
Confederate flag debate, as well as to reflect on the ways our cultural and
personal histories can control us—or challenge us to overcome them.

As
The World Made Straight opens on an August afternoon in 1978, Madison
County, North Carolina native Travis Shelton has traded trout-f­ishing for
pot-poaching. A skinny ­seventeen-year-old, Travis is already a knowledgeable
outdoorsman, but he has no real vision for his future. He finds satisfaction in
the physical labor of tobacco-farming, but he has watched his father’s
financial prospects dwindle as demand for his crop declines. Moreover, Travis’s
attempts to resist internalizing his father’s contempt for him drive him to
self-destructive acts of defiance: dropping out of school, driving too fast,
drinking too much. As he fishes above a waterfall in the book’s first scene,
Travis relishes his own foolhardiness and remembers a characteristic
assessment: “Nothing but a bother from the day he was born. Puny and sickly as
a baby and nothing but trouble ever since. That’s what his father had said to
his junior high principal” (7). In light of this internal monologue, Travis’s
subsequent decision to steal and sell five marijuana plants he spies along the
creek is hardly surprising.

The
novel’s tension rises when Travis returns not just once but even a second time
to steal from Carlton and Hubert Toomey, whose reputations for violence would
intimidate anyone with a grain of sense. Travis tells himself, however, that
the father and son are too lazy to catch him:

Travis’s daddy claimed
the Toomeys poached bears on national forest land. They cut off the paws and
gutted out the gallbladders because folks in China paid good money to make
potions from them. The Toomeys left the meat to rot, too sorry even to cut a
few hams off the bears’ flanks. Anybody that trifling wouldn’t bother walking
the hundred yards between farmhouse and creek to watch for trespassers. (8)

Travis
is right about the Toomeys’ indolence, but he woefully underestimates the
creativity with which they will keep watch over their cash crop.

On
his second visit to the marijuana field, Travis battles a bit with his nerves:
“When he came to where the plants were, he got on all fours and crawled up the
bank, raising his head like a soldier in a trench. A Confederate flag
brightened his tee-shirt, and he wished he’d had the good sense to wear
something less visible. Might as well have a damn bull’s-eye on his chest”
(25). Fortunately, the Toomeys don’t take aim at him on this occasion, and he
successfully transports his load of plunder to a small-time drug dealer,
Leonard Shuler.

The
Confederate flag tee-shirt is not, however, lost on Leonard. After completing
the drug transaction, he talks with Travis over beers. When Travis observes
that Leonard’s house trailer is full of books, Leonard tells him, “Keeps me
from being ignorant.” Travis retorts that some of his teachers have been too
stupid to change their own cars’ oil, to which Leonard replies, “Stupidity and
ignorance aren’t the same thing. You can’t cure someone of stupidity. Somebody
like yourself that’s merely ignorant there might be hope for.”

Travis
demands, “What reason you got to say I’m ignorant?”

“That tee-shirt you’re
wearing, for one thing. If you’d worn it up here in the 1860s it could have
gotten you killed, and by your own blood kin.” (28)

Thus
begins Travis’s months-long history tutorial, which is also Rash’s readers’
289-page tutorial on Appalachia’s complex Civil War legacy.

Travis,
as Leonard deduces in their first encounter, is the descendent of
Union-sympathizers killed by their Confederate neighbors in the 1863 massacre
at Shelton Laurel. His wearing a Confederate tee-shirt truly does signal his
ignorance of local and familial history. When Leonard asks him whether his
family never talked about the massacre, Travis thinks hard and responds,
“Sometimes my daddy and uncle talked about kin that got killed in Shelton
Laurel during the war, but I always figured the yankees had done it” (29).
Travis immediately rejects the possibility of his family’s having been Yankees,
and Leonard acknowledges that they were not, “at least not in the geographical
sense.” But, he adds, “They had a side. Nobody had the luxury of staying out of
it up here. Most places they’d fight a battle and move on, but once war came it
didn’t leave Madison County” (29). The region, he explains, came to be known as
Bloody Madison.

Thirty
years later and far beyond Madison County, Travis has companions in confusion,
as James W. Loewen contends in “Why Do People Believe Myths About the
Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments Are Wrong” (WashingtonPost, July 1, 2015). Loewen points out,
for example, that even though only 35,000 Kentuckians fought for the South
while 90,000 fought for the North, Confederate monuments there now outnumber
Union ones seventy-two to two. Similarly, Frederick County, Maryland, has a
Confederate memorial, and locals commemorate the Southern cause around Memorial
Day even though Confederate officer Jubal Early demanded a $200,000 ransom from
their forebears in 1864 (about $3 million in 2015 dollars) in order not to burn
the town. Loewen asserts, “The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose)
what they could not win on the battlefield…. We are still digging ourselves out
from under the misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our public
monuments and our history books.” Clearly, Rash shares Loewen’s concern.

In
The World Made Straight, then, Rash helps clear up significant confusion
regarding one Civil War event about which most Americans, even in the immediate
vicinity, are misinformed if not totally unaware. Leonard Shuler, in contrast,
may live in a rusty trailer; sell pot, pills, and beer to teenagers; and even
be rumored to have killed someone, but he knows history. While trying in vain
to forget his painful personal past, Leonard reads widely about painful
political conflict: Hitler’s and Stalin’s atrocities (94); American Indian
rivalries (181); and, of course, the US Civil War. The insights of Simone Weil
have formed his thinking; he quotes her to Travis about halfway through the
book: “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as
it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. Those
who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone… a soul which has
entered the province of force will not escape this except by a miracle” (162).
Later, when he accompanies Travis and Travis’s girlfriend Lori to the Shelton
Laurel massacre site, Leonard remembers Weil’s claim that “[t]he true object of
war is the warrior’s soul” (206). A drunkard and a contributor to the delinquency
of minors, Leonard nevertheless proves to be a philosopher well-equipped to
guide Travis from ignorance to a surprising form of wisdom.

In
doing so, Leonard reclaims his own vocation. Coming from the same impoverished
community as Travis, Leonard had studied his way out of Madison County into a
scholarship at and a degree from UNC-Chapel Hill. Pressed by his wife Kera to
move to an area where they could both find teaching jobs, she in English and he
in history, Leonard had reluctantly re-located with her and their young
daughter Emily to the Chicago area. The marriage, however, fell apart, with
Kera repeatedly accusing Leonard of “living in the passive voice, letting
others make choices so if things went wrong he didn’t have to bear the blame” (54).
Leonard developed a drinking problem and then plea-bargained when a vengeful
student planted marijuana in his car and accused him of dealing. Leonard’s
acquiescence to pressure from school and legal authorities confirmed Kera’s
contemptuous assessment of him, and he subsequently lost his marriage, access
to his daughter, and his job. Eventually, he made his way back to Madison
County, justifying peddling dope and booze to self-destructive young people as
“merely speeding up the process of natural selection” (74). Getting to know
Travis, however, stirs Leonard’s desire to teach and ultimately helps him
emerge from his own darkness.

That
darkness runs deep. Demoralized by Kera’s verbal abuse and rejection, her
subsequent departure with their child and a new husband to Australia, and his
own unemployment, Leonard also has what he considers a legacy of “dark spells”
from his mother. “She’d stayed in bed for days at a time,” he recalls. She
“...left the bedroom only to whip Leonard and his sister for playing too
loudly” (158). Moreover, he is haunted by accounts of the massacre at Shelton
Laurel. Like Travis, he is a descendent of those involved in that conflict.
Unlike Travis, however, he knows his family history all too well, and his side
was complicit in the killing. Supplementing and correcting Leonard’s textbooks’
accounts of the Civil War is the sixteen-volume journal of his great-great
grandfather, Joshua Candler, a physician conscripted into the Confederate
regiment that slaughtered Travis’s relatives.

Because
his own last name is Shuler, Leonard is able to conceal his Candler connection
from Travis for most of the book. In educating Travis about Shelton Laurel, he
appears simply to be exposing the young man to both sides of the story for
objectivity’s sake. In response to Travis’s incredulity about the Confederates’
having killed his relative David Shelton, who was only twelve years old at the
time, Leonard quotes a regiment member’s having observed that “a nit makes a
louse”—“kill the offspring before they get big enough to kill you” (75). When
Travis questions further how the Confederates could have killed their own
neighbors, Leonard reminds him of World War II atrocities and notes that
Confederate Colonel Lawrence Allen had convinced his men that Union-sympathizers
were “bushwhackers,” criminals rather than legitimate military opponents who,
if captured, would deserve execution rather than imprisonment as prisoners of
war (94). (Although Rash does not elaborate, using language that casts others
as vermin or criminals is common in situations of rising conflict among
neighbors, as Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews illustrates.) Later, when Travis
responds angrily to an old library book’s account of the regiment’s having
beaten an eighty-five-year-old woman, Leonard tells him, “I know. I’ve read
this book. It’s got one big flaw as history, though. It fails to show the other
side.”

“What other side?”
Travis asked.

“How the Sixty-fourth
[Confederate regiment] had been shot at for days. How miserable the weather
was, how rough the terrain. They figured those women could tell where the
snipers were and save them a lot of time and work. Save some of their own lives
as well.”

“It was still wrong,”
Travis said. “I wouldn’t have shot a twelve-year-old boy.”

“Saying that here and
now is different than if you’d been there… Some soldiers didn’t want to shoot
at first, but [Lieutenant] Keith told them if they didn’t they’d be killed as
well. What if you had a wife and a child? It’s 1863 and they’re about starved
to death as it is. The man giving the orders knows where your family lives.
It’s no longer just about you. You’ve already seen an eighty-five-year-old
woman being beaten, so you know he’d as likely do the same to your wife or
daughter.” (161)

Having
read and re-read his great-great-­grandfather’s journal entries leading up to
the massacre, Leonard understands the complexity of the situation, complexity
that reverberates in recent news accounts of Irish, Balkan, Rwandan, Liberian,
and Syrian atrocities.

Rash
enriches readers’ experience by interspersing pages from Joshua Candler’s
journal with the main narrative, enabling us to watch tension build in Madison
County as war approaches and takes hold. Candler comments briefly on each day’s
medical cases, beginning with farming injuries, fevers, and childbirth
complications in the 1850s; branching out to a broken nose, bloody lips, and
even gunshot wounds resulting from arguments over secession in 1861; and
continuing with the horrific disemboweling of a Sixty-fourth regimental sentry
by hisUnionist neighbors who were hiding in the hills to avoid
conscription. By providing this detail, Candler helps account for the
Confederates’ subsequent brutality during the massacre, but he also reveals
that he would have preferred not to serve as the Confederates’ doctor. When he
treats Lawrence Allen for hoarseness on May 13, 1861, he editorializes far more
than usual, “Would it be that not just Allen but Zeb Vance and his Raleigh
firebrands would get aphonia to quite [sic] their braying about states [sic]
rights” (102). Reporting on the county’s secession vote, he notes, “Final
delegate vote: 28 for Secessionists, 144 Unionists. This folly may yet be
prevented” (103). As Leonard studies these entries, he agonizes over his
great-great-grandfather’s having witnessed and perhaps even participated in the
massacre of his own former patients, particularly young David Shelton, with
whom he had sat up all night when the boy had typhoid in 1859. Leonard muses,
“[W]hat role for a man who’d been against secession yet had not fled to
Tennessee with his first cousin to join the Union forces? A man who had not
volunteered for the Confederate army but had been conscripted, evidently
letting his allegiance be decided by which side first chose to place its claim
on him” (206). How guilty was his ancestor, Leonard seems to be wondering, of
living in the passive voice?

Leonard
himself is certainly guilty, as is Travis. Each lets whim—his own or
others’—carry him, and each makes excuses for his poor choices. While Rash does
not justify these choices, the backstories he gives both men make their
behavior understandable. Each has experienced beatings by a parent, and each
has suffered ongoing verbal abuse by a family member. As Carolyn Yoder notes in
The Little Book of Trauma Healing, domestic abuse survivors often both
“act in,” experiencing high levels of depression and abusing substances, and
“act out,” engaging in high-risk and aggressive behaviors, committing criminal
acts, and perpetuating domestic abuse themselves. Moreover, they typically
battle apathy and low productivity, communication problems, either-or thinking,
and inability to trust (33). Through expert exposition and painstaking plot
development, Rash helps us understand why passivity plagues both Leonard and
Travis.

Fascinatingly,
Rash also suggests that Leonard’s and Travis’s individual family histories
alone do not account for their plights. They are also survivors of what Yoder
calls historical trauma. Drawing from the work of Maria Yellow Horse Brave
Heart, Yoder defines historical trauma as “the cumulative emotional and
psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations emanating from
massive group trauma” (13). The effects of historical trauma can last for generations,
she explains, “even when the next generation is not told the trauma story, or
knows it only in broad outline. A ‘conspiracy of silence’ surrounds events for
which grieving and mourning have never taken place” (14). Leonard describes
such a conspiracy when Travis asks him why people don’t talk about the
massacre: “The men who shot them were also from this county. Even after the war
some folks got killed because of what happened that morning. People believed it
was better not to talk about it” (93). Trauma studies scholars might look to
the 1863 Shelton Laurel massacre as an unacknowledged but significant factor in
the Candler and Shelton families’ legacies of poverty, depression, and domestic
abuse.

David
Anderson Hooker and Amy Potter Czajkowski have extended Yoder’s work on trauma
in their Transforming Historical Harms manual, which offers an
additional helpful lens for considering Rash’s novel. While Hooker and
Czajkowski’s treatment of US historical trauma focuses primarily on the Coming
to the Table project, in which descendants of slave-owning and enslaved people
collaborate to address slavery’s legacy and aftermath, their insights are also
useful for reflecting on the Civil War’s effects on Appalachia. Hooker and
Czajkowski explain that while trauma certainly affects individuals, communities
and even entire societies often develop shared struggles after traumagenic
events. “Victors” and their descendants typically cultivate an “us-vs.-them”
group identity alongside a “good-vs.-evil” narrative in which they de-humanize
the enemy, come to regard violence as redemptive, and savor social pride in
their triumph. (Loewen suggests that although they lost the war, those today
who claim the Confederate legacy have adopted the victors’ attitudes.) Survivors
on the “losing” side often experience increased rates of depression, anxiety,
self-abuse, and addiction; battle existential doubt and survivor guilt; and
succumb to learned helplessness, hopelessness, and fatalism (23). Travis and
Leonard, their parents, and many of their impoverished neighbors fall into that
second group. These characteristics are, in fact, common even in other parts of
Appalachia, where assaults by outsiders who plundered the region for its
resources have been even more destructive than the Civil War was.

What
hope, then, exists for historically traumatized people, in fiction or in real
life? Strikingly, Rash takes Leonard and Travis through a restorative process
remarkably similar to the Transforming Historical Harms (THH) framework Hooker
and Czajkowski set forth in their manual. Those seeking healing, they
recommend, should face history, make connections, heal wounds, and take action
in order to “build a more truthful, just and connected society” (29). Facing
history, they assert, must go beyond reviewing the “victors’” accounts that
typically appear in history textbooks to uncover both the extent of the harms
the victors committed and the traumagenic circumstances they faced (34).

In
carefully combing through and reflecting on competing historical accounts of
the Shelton Laurel massacre, Leonard and Travis face history in just this way.
They make connections, most obviously with each other, but also with their
forebears as they return to and reflect on the massacre site, even putting on
young David Shelton’s eyeglasses to observe what he might have seen before his
death. Much like the descendants of slaveholders and enslaved people in the
Coming to the Table project, Leonard and Travis operate as surrogates for their
forebears. The imaginative exercises they undertake during their site visits
function as healing rituals, which Hooker and Czajkowski say should address a
trauma’s “physiological, spiritual, emotional, and cognitive dimensions” (38).
Finally, both Leonard and Travis take action. Although they do not tackle
destructive, trauma-induced social and economic systems in the manner that
Hooker and Czajkowski urge, each man breaks out of his pattern of passivity to
liberate Dena, another character close to them who has been held captive,
literally by the Toomeys and figuratively by her own self-abuse.

What
enables them to do so? Love. In When Blood and Bones Cry Out (2010),
John Paul Lederach and Angela Jill Lederach celebrate love’s mysterious
capacity to heal historical trauma. Acknowledging that analyzing love “enters
the slippery slope of the intangibles that lie outside the scientific
endeavor,” they point to five recent studies in medicine, neurology,
psychology, and sociology that examine love’s effects. In a sixth that they
deem particularly noteworthy, A General Theory of Love (2001), three
psychologists offer an account of “the impact and importance of love as a
transformative component of healing and its impact on relationships” (231).
While Lederach and Lederach’s ensuing argument may not convince all readers,
Rash’s artistic treatment of the topic is irresistibly compelling. Leonard and
Travis have formed a family of sorts with Dena, and in spite of each
character’s struggle to trust, they love each other. Travis comes to relate to
Leonard as a son to his father, and Leonard’s love for the young man motivates
him to stop dealing drugs and drinking. Leonard’s love for his daughter Emily
empowers him further, motivating him to take up honest work and save money to
visit her in Australia. Even more importantly, the memory of his last
interaction with Emily empowers Leonard to stand up to Carlton Toomey, and his
hope of reunion with her enables him to meet his final, desperate challenge
with dignity. Travis’s relationship with his girlfriend Lori also helps him
develop a hopeful vision for his life, a vision he had been denied for his
first seventeen years.

Some
readers might charge that calling The World Made Straight a hopeful
novel strains credulity. The final chapters’ cataclysmic encounters between the
Toomeys and Leonard, Travis, and Dena are bloody and violent, and the ending is
ambiguous, at best. For many Christian readers, however, the last paragraph
will shine. Shortly before the narrative explodes in physical violence, Lori
gives Travis a silver cross and chain, “to protect you when I’m not around”
(233). Distraught over an agonizing encounter with his father, Travis takes his
anger out on her, dismissing the gift, picking a quarrel with her, and pitching
the necklace out his car window when she flees in tears. At the novel’s end,
however, after a series of actions that demonstrate his courage and generosity,
he goes to her. She may reject him, of course, but, then again, she may not.
Rash concludes:

His life was beyond [the]
fields, but Travis knew he would never forget this smell or the cool moist feel
of broken ground. He inhaled deeply, held it in like a man savoring the taste
of a last cigarette. The road curved briefly, then straightened as he began the
long ascent north to Antioch. (289)

Antioch,
North Carolina, where Lori lives in squalor with her millworker-mother,
unmarried pregnant sister, and little brother, may be the poorest hamlet in
Madison County, but readers who know their church history will recognize
ancient Antioch as one of the primary launching points for the Gospel.

The
World Made Straight will never show up in a Christian bookstore, and, in
interviews, Rash is far readier to speak about wonder in general terms than
about conventional religious faith. Lederach and Lederach identify experiences
of wonder as powerful aids in trauma healing, and Leonard and Travis’s vast and
shared capacity for wonder in nature is a key element in the novel (Lederach
and Lederach, 133). Rash did, however, grow up Southern Baptist and expresses
deep appreciation for having been “saturated in the Bible” (interview, July 2,
2015). That he offers a hint of Christian hope in a book about the effects of
historical trauma breathes life into Alan D. Falconer’s 1998 consideration of
Irish political conflict in “The Reconciling Power of Forgiveness.” Falconer
writes, “The sense of impotence in the face of the past is matched by an
equally powerful sense of impotence to fashion the future…. Power to break the
cycle, the impotence, is proclaimed to be the work of Jesus Christ, above all
in making new and in freeing humankind from the burden of the past and giving
hope for the future” (177, 178). Drawing from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s treatment
of responsibility in Ethics, Falconer asserts that a robust
understanding and application of the Gospel is profoundly relevant for
historical trauma survivors.

Rash,
too, looks to Bonhoeffer for inspiration. When asked in 2006 about his decision
to write about Shelton Laurel, he replied:

I think it’s a meditation
on violence. I’ve always been horrified and fascinated over people, who live in
close proximity to each other, turning on one another. During Pol Pot’s reign
in Cambodia. In Bosnia. Rwanda. It’s unsettling to see people fall back into a
tribal mentality. To me it’s horrifying and one of the most depressing
things humans can do to each other. The hope is that there will always be
people who fight against it. People like Bonhoeffer in Germany. (Zacharias
2006)

More
recently and closer to home, Rash might look also to the members of Charleston,
South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, who chose to
absorb through forgiveness the hatred of Dylann Roof, the murderer who cloaked
himself in the Confederate flag for selfies. As James W. Loewen acknowledges in
his lament about misinformation surrounding the Civil War, “De-Confederatizing
the United States won’t end white supremacy, but it will be a momentous step in
the right direction.” One novel can’t undo the massacre at Shelton Laurel or
its effects, either, but Ron Rash’s exploration of its complexity in The
World Made Straight offers hope not just to people in Appalachia but to
historical trauma survivors all over the world.

Martha Greene Eads is Professor of English at Eastern Mennonite University.

Works
Cited

“Elieen
Battersby’s Books of the Year.” The Irish Times. December 17, 2011.